Sarah Sze

Зе, Сара
サラ・セーTriple Point (eclipse)

source: wired

Sarah Sze spent the months leading up to the Venice Biennale collecting what some might consider trash. Each day the artist, who is representing the United States at the biennale, would take the objects she found around Venice (napkins, paint cans, espresso cups, water bottles) and carefully place them among one of the five installations she created for the annual art festival. Titled Triple Point, the exhibition is a series of interconnected installations that spill across the rooms of the U.S. Pavilion. Much like her previous work, Sze’s Triple Point is intricate, architectural and adaptive to the space it inhabits. “Both Carey and I are interested in working with artists who create evolving installations,” says Holly Block, executive director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts and co-commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion with Carey Lovelace. “We wanted to work with someone who would completely alter the U.S. Pavilion’s traditional building site.”

THIS IS ORGANIZED CHAOS, NOT UNLIKE THE SITE OF AN ARCHEOLOGICAL DIG.
Sze did exactly that, starting with the neighborhood surrounding the exhibition. Scattered around the Giardini Via Garibaldi area of Venice are realistic-looking rocks made of Tyvek. They sit atop newsstands and on the floors of local vegetarian restaurants, and hover on apartment balconies. The rocks indirectly lead visitors to the courtyard of the stately 1930s building designed by William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich where Triple Point actually begins. Once there, viewers encounter an erector-set like contraption made from an assemblage of aluminum rods, pieces of wood and a multitude of found objects. This first piece, Gleaner, requires visitors to redirect to the side of the building where they enter the rest of the exhibition from a side exit door. This is not an accident. One of Sze’s main goals is to recalibrate her visitors’ inner compass.

Sze’s work can be disorienting. Once inside, visitors are directed through a series of installations located in different rooms throughout the building. A piece like Planetarium, with its thin wooden frame and overwhelming number of objects, looks as though it could topple over from the sum of its parts, while Observatory appears to be the workspace of a crazed, but orderly scientist. Don’t be fooled, though. This is organized chaos, not unlike the site of an archeological dig, says Block.

“Sarah’s work may seem random, it is not,” she said. “It has been highly orchestrated, and each item is deliberately placed. The feeling that you get from seeing the overall work is the important part, rather than the individual objects. It is almost as if you’re looking at a world frozen in time.”